SIGHT
by Jiia-chan
Summary: [BatmanXConstantine Crossover] When two people were as similar as they, it couldn't possibly be a coincidence. They had too much in common for it to be anything but fate. John and Jon, doctor and patient, two sides of the same coin. Slash.
1. Sorrow

Sorrow.

I have read many a Constantine/Batman crossover. But I have actually liked very few of them. So I decided to write my own. In my little fantasy land, John grew up in Gotham and moved to Los Angeles. So there. Bite me. There will be five chapters to this story. I might make a sequal. Feel free to guess at the title of the next chapter. And yes, they will spell sight. Anyways, yes or no? Just pick one, and review it to me. Don't worry about the question, there isn't one.

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The boy wasn't quite young. That is to say, he was younger than the doctor treating him, but not young enough for said doctor to consider him a child. But it had another meaning too. Under that frail, flimsy shell of a sixteen year old boy, there lurked a soul that had suffered far more than anyone less than ten times that should have to suffer. Underneath that waxen skin, that lank, dark hair, behind those worn out brown eyes, there was an old soul trying desperately to escape from the cruel world around him.

The doctor understood completely. The two of them had led shockingly similar lives. Born into lower middle class families, smarter than all the other members of those families put together and hated for it, bullied and abused every step of the way by imbeciles who couldn't understand them even if they bothered to try… Reading this young man's chart was like reading his own autobiography. There was just one small, but very important difference.

Somewhere along the line, this boy had broken, and he hadn't.

It made him feel disturbingly proud, in a way. The two of them had faced the same challenges, walked the same path. But the boy had fallen along the way, and he hadn't. He was the stronger. He had accomplished what another had failed to do.

He had kept his mind.

"Dr. Jon? Are you all right?" It was Mary, of course. She was the only one who dared call the eccentric genius by his first name.

"Yes, of course." He flashed her one of his ingenuous smiles, electric blue eyes glittering from under his graceful, arching brows. "Why would you think otherwise?"

"It's just that you've been staring at that there boy for an awful long time, Dr. Jon." The aged nurse looked at him, concern clear upon her features.

"He interests me." Dr. Crane turned back to the tiny Plexiglas window separating him from the boy who could have been him.

"I suppose it's only natural." The nurse said casually, shooting a sly look in his direction. "You doctors have a tendency to be most interested in yourselves."

Crane scoffed, not because the statement was false but because it was all too true. Especially in his own field. There was little that interested a psychologist so much as the innermost workings of his own mind.

But his interest in this boy went beyond the relatively superficial similarities between the two. They intrigued him, yes, but there was more to it than that. There was something about the boy, about the way he behaved. Perhaps it was the way he talked to his fabricated delusions of air and shadow, with the terrified resignation of a man used to being afraid. All these things might have been it, but only one thing actually was.

When the boy looked at him, talked to him, his eyes were dull. For all the demons he spoke to, for all the angels he begged to help him, there was no glitter of insanity resting in those dark eyes. There was nothing there.

Nothing but sorrow.


	2. Innocence

Insanity.

He knew the doctor was watching him. He knew it, every single time. He always knew. Sometimes he felt like he knew everything, but he didn't. He knew nothing. But that wasn't true, because he knew something after all.

He knew the doctor was watching. And he knew the doctor was him.

It was him, all right. He himself. On the other side of the criss-crossed glass he was waiting for himself, as he should be, as he could be, as he would have been if he couldn't See.

But he could See. And the man on the other side of the glass could not. The man on the other side of the glass was as blind as the rest of them, as blind as his mother and his father and the others who walked up and hit him and hit him and made him bleed because he told them what he saw, all his did was tell them what he saw was that so wrong and he was doing it again so he slapped himself upside the head to make it stop.

This place was driving him insane. Everything was white. There wasn't any colour, not even in the people. But it wasn't just a lack of colour, black and white TVs don't have any colour, but they still have black, and here they didn't even have black, just the white, and the occasional grey. It was Boring. He had nothing to think about, no one to talk to, nothing to do nothing to think nothing to be nothing. No wonder everyone they decided to stick into an insane asylum was mad! The place made them that way! And the screaming, it never stopped, the screaming went on and on and always it was there reminding him exactly where he was.

He envied the man outside the glass. He wished he could be standing there too, looking in on the quivering mass of skin and bone he had degenerated into. He wished he could look at the stout little nurse standing next to him, on her tiptoes to see in, and not see the shimmer of altered eyes, the grey expanse of half-breed angel wings spreading out behind her like the very first clouds of a burgeoning storm. He wished he couldn't. But he did. He did see, because he Saw, and that meant that he had to be here, on this side of the glass, staring out through brown eyes into the eyes that were blue, because that was the only difference between them really. Just a change in shade. The change of a name. Such a small difference, even their initials were the same, how could it be coincidence? Nothing was coincidence. It was all one great big cosmic joke, and he was the punch line.

He began to laugh. He couldn't help it. It tore itself loose from him in great sobbing, hysterical fits, shaking as much as his paper-thin hands, shaking and shaking and shaking until he finally woke up and he stopped.

The doctor was watching him. He turned to look, and smiled, and laughed, but controlled this time, bitter, angry, cynical, not maniacal. He turned, and he spoke, shouting so the man behind the glass could hear him, shouting so the half-breed demon in the cell beside him would know, would hear, would remember, shouting because he couldn't think of anything else to do.

"THIS IS CONSTANINE! JOHN CONSTANTINE, ASSHOLE!"

And then the laughter was back, the maniacal kind, and he felt just a little bit more of what he was slip away.


End file.
